Since the only people who buy CDs anymore are over the age of 50, could you please test-drive the cover, credits, lyric sheet, etc. by someone who wears reading glasses to make sure that person can read them? Fuck the small print shit – when you print in dark gray 9or even silver) on black, it’d damn fucking close to impossible to read regardless of the size of the font.
Kthxbye.
You’re lucky if you even *get *liner notes with a CD. I miss the pages and pages of stuff you used to get with an LP. Not to mention the big glorious cover art. And the smell of fresh vinyl when you first slit open the plastic wrap! Damn, now I’m getting nostalgic.
Please allow me to add dvd editors to this, too. It irritates me a little when I’m trying to read the credits on a dvd and either they don’t fit on the screen, or they’re teensy tiny, or they scroll by like a sonofabitch. This is digital media - you can make them anything you want, so how about making them readable on the average home entertainment system?
This is especially irritating when we’re trying to catch the credits on a tv show to see who those familiar faces were, and all of the above happens PLUS the idiotic tv stations cram them over to one side so you can endure an ad for the next tv show.
Good point, CW. That’s why I try to watch movies with IMDb open on my laptop.
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who does that, TMR (or at least have gotten into the habit of checking IMDb shortly after - or sometimes even before - watching movies).
I have designed many CDs, including inserts, backs and printing on the disks themselves. I’m always checking to make sure every single thing is legible . . . especially when the background is variable, e.g. type over a photo. It’s appalling how mane designers just don’t take the trouble to actually look at what they’ve created.
What happened to those papers inside the DVD case that tel you the title of each chapter and what the special features are? You cheap bastards charging $20 for new releases need to knock this bulllshit off!
I would like to add a note to the Spanish Government.
Spain is the only country in the world that has an actual regulation on how to subtitle. True, the norm is specifically oriented towards its use on “teletext”, but it also explains the principles behind every point and that those principles should be used in any form of subtitling. There is an enormous push toward having more and more subtitled content, as well, either via Teletexto or through “dual channeling” (pick one channel, you get the movie in Spanish; pick another, you get it in the original language with Spanish subtitles).
So why, oh why, do all those recent government ads have subtitles which are about half the size they should be, actually about half the size DVD subtitles are, and which if I can barely read them there is no frakkin’ way someone with “old sight” will?
You’re supposed to follow your own rules! Morons!
Back to the issue of type, I’ll share a little secret with you (but you can’t tell anyone where you heard it).
As a graphic designer, I’ll admit that we’re not designing with Olde Fartes™ in mind. Or the reader at all. Nuh uh, our audience is the Art Director at the Design Shop down the street who’ll be looking at our portfolio.
If you can read it, it ain’t hip enough.
Yeah, I know – and as someone who has been the boss of graphics people, I have a long history of telling them to knock it the fuck off. “Think of the reader” is the prime directive of editing – and it includes both clarity of content (editorial) and clarity of presentation (layout).
Amen. And another prime directive of editing is “Creative people are impossible to supervise”*.
I stopped doing it, and now teach.
*So everyone be nice to twickster--you know it's been a tough day at work.I’ll add that those of us who still buy CDs can be flummoxed by the packaging. Why, when products such as cigarettes have cellophane packaging that can be opened by a two-year-old, are CDs packaged in cellophane that requires tweezers, knives, scissors, and my extra-strength glasses?
On how a graphics designer can “Not get it”
Probably because nobody buys, takes home, copies, and then attempts to return a pack of cigarettes.
Which Old Farts are too old (and busy and ethical and low-tech and yep, still busy …and farty) to bother with.
I just want to add a bitch about the text on video game packaging. The system requirements and most of the other text with the spacing between lines included with the text is one sixteenth of an inch.
letter height + line spacing = 1/16" total
I just used a ruler to measure this.
My pet peeve is asshole designers who make a CD label with NO text on it at all! If you take that disc out of the case and don’t keep track of it, you have to play it to figure out what it is (or pop it in the computer and let CDDb figure it out.)
Some of us have more than one CD.
I’ve never seen that, but if I did, I’d take one of my CD markers and label it myself.
You can do that, but often the asshole designer has anticipated this and designed the label graphic in very dark colors, so only the very rare silver Sharpie will do. They are clever, in a completely evil way.
I don’t see why the packaging has to be impossible to open in order to give an indication that it has been opened. Some kind of easily breakable film seal with a serial number on it would seem to do the trick.